Building information modeling: Is it your next (or first) lean initiative?

Add Building Information Modeling to your bag of lean tricks to get the most out of planning, design and execution.

by Paul Markgraff

Five years ago, John Tocci attended a presentation that sticks with him to this day. It was one of those presentations that you can’t stop thinking about, and it wasn’t the professional quality PowerPoint slides or well-rehearsed speaker he remembers.

It was a confession of the obvious, and it had little to do with construction.

Rather, it was a presentation about Toyota, and its innovative approach to eliminating waste and continually improving processes to drive costs downward and improve efficiency and productivity. It was a presentation about lean manufacturing and its Japanese roots.

But then, the presenters – Greg Howell of the Lean Construction Institute and Dave Hanson of the multi-billion-dollar commercial contracting firm Walbridge Aldinger – explained that U.S. automakers were beginning to embrace the concepts behind lean manufacturing in order to achieve the same efficiencies Toyota had. In fact, U.S. automakers were requiring all of their buildings to be delivered with the lean process.

“It was the combination of hearing that, and 30 years of experience of living without lean, experiencing the failures of inadequate planning and inadequate organization, that led us toward the decision to embrace lean,” says Tocci, CEO of Tocci Building Companies of Woburn, Mass. “There’s so much failure in a typical construction project, and I’m not talking about a bad contractor’s job. I’m talking about a good contractor’s job.”

The problem is, construction is not manufacturing. With manufacturing, everything is controlled. Most every process happens indoors. As products move through the production process, there is very little unpredictability. Construction is different. It is inherently fluid. Processes are always changing, because they depend on many external factors, such as weather, supply issues, and others’ lack of efficiency or rework.

And yet, Tocci saw promise in the lean thinking and acted on it.

Learning lean
Lean is the pursuit of eliminating waste from an organization while creating value for customers, employees and owners. Everyone in a lean organization is dedicated to creating value as defined by the customer. At the same time, each employee seeks process waste and destroys it.

Generally, there are eight wastes that occur in every business:
1. Overproduction: Making more than the customer requires
2. Inventory: Excess supply
3. Motion: Movement that does not add value to the product or service
4. Processing: Any effort that does not add value
5. Quality: Repair of product following inspection
6. Waiting: Waiting for materials, tools or instructions
7. Transportation: Unnecessary movement of resources or supplies
8. People: Underutilizing workers, wasting their natural abilities

Waste exists on every job site, and it costs contractors and owners bottom-line dollars. Properly implemented, lean can turn a construction project from a chaotic, reactive environment into a predictable, reliable one.

“Instead of accelerating inefficiency to the speed of light, we wanted to eliminate anything that doesn’t add value,” says Tocci. “We’re using Building Information Modeling (BIM) to examine our processes and fix disfunctionality between stakeholders. When you implement these tools, the job becomes very predictable and organized. That’s what I’m after. I’m tired of the alternative.”

Tocci Building Companies use BIM as the cornerstone of its lean activities. “We’re finding that BIM is the foundational tool for implementing an efficient delivery process,” says Tocci.

Though the company is currently at the beginning of its lean journey, it recently launched a project with Johnson & Johnson to research and develop universal protocols for a lean-oriented, team-based approach to design and construction. The team – which also includes architect KlingStubbins, MEP subcontractor EMCOR and construction company Gilbane – is using BIM to facilitate the study.

The project compares the BIM model to the conventional project approach to find differences in the projected outcome. The test case was based upon a $150 million facility recently completed by Johnson & Johnson.

“We couldn’t afford to tackle the entire project at once, so we decided to work with a single mechanical system,” says Tocci. “We went to EMCOR and selected HVAC as our scope. But even that was too detailed.”

Finally, Tocci and EMCOR decided to model the air handling systems. Four key executives from the companies and several directors from Johnson & Johnson spent more than 30 hours in meetings and conference calls to map out who would take the lead responsibility for each of the incremental functions required to assemble the air handling systems.

“There were more than 300 incremental functions for this system in a fairly complex mechanical building,” Tocci says. “That process assigned a leader to each activity and also a support person. The process sounds simple but it took a long time.”

It also fleshed out misconceptions about which companies were responsible for which activities.

“It gives rise to incredible efficiencies during the course of a project,” says Tocci. “One of the vice presidents from Johnson & Johnson told us it’s a darn good thing we didn’t start building this project six months ago, because we needed to go through this process. It was almost cathartic.”

BIM is the tool that invariably leads to lean construction, says Tocci. His company now has a tool that defines every object in a building. To use the tool properly, the key is defining who is responsible for designing, selecting, purchasing, delivering and getting product to the jobsite.

A treasure map
BIM basically helps contractors develop a value-stream map of a project before the project begins.

In manufacturing, where lean got its start, value-stream mapping is defined as a technique used to chart the flow of information and materials required to bring a product or service to a customer, according to Learning to See by Mike Rother and John Shook.

Manufacturers use value-stream mapping to throw a spotlight on wasteful processes in a production system: some wasted movement here, some wasted raw material there, workers standing and waiting for the next products to come down the line.

BIM does the same thing, but where manufacturers often use dry-erase boards and Post-It notes to build their value-stream map, contractors have the luxury of using software specifically designed to take their project from conception to delivery. The software lives and breathes with jobsite changes; as raw materials prices change in the database, the overall change is reflected project-wide through the model.

“The model can also be queried and sorted, which is incredibly important,” says Tocci. “You can sort by discipline. You can send only relevant information to the responsible party. We are going to build productivity information into the model next, so that crew sizes will flow from the model week by week.”

Say nay no more
BIM has its detractors. Many contractors argue that building processes are not the same from job to job and every building is different. They’ll ask how can they create repeatable processes when every building is different?

This is where lean construction diverges somewhat from lean manufacturing, but it’s only a matter of perspective. Contractors need to understand that it’s the process of building that gets optimized, says Tocci. Contractors will spend far more time designing a project than ever before, but there will be far less costly rework and much more reliability from all parties involved.

“We need more time in planning and less time in execution,” says Tocci. “We need to build it virtually first and flesh out the details before we go into the field with hundreds of people who make $75/hour standing around.”

Eventually, Tocci plans to roll-out numerous other lean tools to his workers. He’s driven by the excitement of improvement and he’s sure there’s a whole tier of contractors out there just like him.

Published in the March/April 2008 issue of Contractor Tools and Supplies magazine.

back to top